UK Government Sponsors a Data Mashup Contest

This could be interesting – the UK government is sponsoring a Show Us a Better Way contest.  Basically they are running a contest where you can submit ideas to which make better use of public information in the form of mashups, KPIs, visualisations etc.  The site points you to a variety of public data which you can use for your prototype and the how-to post gives example of some of the development frameworks you might use, for example Popfly or Yahoo Pipes. 

And there’s a £20,000 prize up for grabs! According to the site faqs the closing date is end of September 08.

Technorati tags: mashup, government, popfly, yahoo pipes google code

SharePoint Server 2007 Search Federation

Arpan Shah has a post about availability of Federated Search for SharePoint 2007.  Right now federated search is only available for Search Server 2008/Express – what this does is allow you to pass queries to other search engines (Live Search, Wikipedia etc) and get the results back alongside your crawled and indexed SharePoint searches.  This feature can be very useful, particularly as you can create your own Federated Search connectors.

Arpan says the federation features will be publicly available for SharePoint 2007 as a “rollup” in early July.  His post also includes a link to a good PowerPoint presentation on Search Server 2008 which you can download here.  In the presentation there is a link to the Search Community Toolkit on CodePlex.  There’s some useful stuff here as well, including some ASP.Net Search controls which you can use to connect to the search web service on SharePoint Server 2007.

Technorati tags: sharepoint, search server, federated Search

Refactor! for ASP.Net

Over the past couple of months I’ve had to do a fair bit of ASP.Net work.  One of the time-consuming areas when using ASP.Net controls is moving display properties to a CSS class rather than spreading them liberally inside the control itself.  Developer Express provide a free download of Refactor! for ASP.Net to help with this, and a whole load of other refactorings – well worth downloading if you use Visual Studio 2005 for ASP.Net development. 

It works with Visual Studio 2005 and the new Orcas beta 1.  You can download here.  If you want to read a little more about it there is a good post on Mark Miller’s blog.

Technorati tags: refactor, Developer Express, asp.net

Mike Gunderloy – Stepping back from Microsoft

Mike Gunderloy’s Daily Grind post on his Larkware News site has for me always been a really useful resource.  I’ve found many developer tools, whitepapers, links etc here which otherwise I just wouldn’t have come across.  Mike has been around in the developer world for a fair amount of time, writing and consulting on topics such as Access, Visual Basic, database development etc.  He also wrote a book called Coder to Developer which is worth reading.  When he’s not involved with software, he also runs a farm !

Recently, I’ve noticed a lot less stuff going up on the Daily Grind.  It turns out that the reason for this is that Mike is trying a one year experiment where he weans himself off Microsoft developer tools and tries out some of the other stuff out there – particularly Ruby and the Rails framework.  He explains what he’s doing here, and now puts a daily posting up on A Fresh Cup.  Mike is not alone in his experiment – I’m beginning to see a lot of interest in Ruby on Rails and other opensource platforms – Scott Hanselman’s post called Is Microsoft losing the Alpha Geeks is also worth a read.

Last November I did a presentation to the UK Access User Group on developer trends, and covered some of the areas that I thought application developers (particularly those who were making a living from Access) should look at.  One of those was Ruby on Rails.  When I went to the May user group seminar, I was quite surprised by the number of attendees who told me that they had been looking at Ruby on Rails, and even been on training courses. 

And at the MIX 07 conference, Microsoft announced Iron Ruby, a Dynamic Language Ruby implementation for the .Net Framework…

Technorati tags: ruby, asp.net, microsoft

Next DDD Day 30th June – Register from 29th May

Well it’s been a long time since I posted anything, mainly because the past 3 months have been extremely busy.  Let’s see if I put that right…

The next Developer Developer Developer day will take place on 30th June at Microsoft Thames Valley Park Reading.  These are always useful and worth giving up a Saturday for.  Registration will open on 29th May, and it always fills up quickly, so don’t wait too long.

Technorati tags: microsoft, ddd, developer